Group items tagged

A common misconception is that these youths are choosing to engage in the commercial sex trade. But as recent advances in neuroimaging techniques help scientists unravel the myriad ways that trauma affects the brain, emerging evidence suggests that brain changes resulting from trauma could make young people more vulnerable to exploiters and less receptive to people trying to help. Rather than making a conscious decision to rebel, these kids are simply doing their best to survive, using the adaptive strategies that their brains developed in response to a perilous world.

Though the human brain is adaptable throughout life, adaptability is greatest during childhood, as the developing brain responds to the surrounding environment. Survival is the brain's top priority. Young people growing up in dangerous environments will develop brains that are highly responsive to threat cues. In particular, recent studies show that children who have experienced trauma exhibit drastic changes in their amygdala, an area of the brain wired to identify signs of danger.

Besides the amygdala, another brain region affected by trauma is the hippocampus, an area involved with contextual learning and memory. The hippocampus takes context into account, so that a person can appropriately respond to the same cues in different situations. For instance, most people would respond differently to hearing gunfire in a shooting range than they would to hearing gunfire in an airport.

The human brain has always loved the dopamine rush of notifications, in any form; recent research indicates the unpredictable but ubiquitous updates of Gmail or Twitter carry the same neurological effect as rocking a slot machine. While Internet use is "not addictive in the same way as pharmacological substances are," as cognitive scientist Tom Stafford noted in 2013, we continually chase those unpredictable payoffs on Facebook and Instagram in ways that tend to mirror gambling or sex addictions, even if "Internet addiction" writ large currently holds an ambiguous position in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

For products whose fundamental business proposition is harnessing attention, building those so-called "compulsion loops" isn't an accident of technology—it's the whole point. Indeed, observers have argued since Parker's "human psychology" flub last year that Facebook has not just meticulously measured, but fundamentally altered human behavior, and nascent technology ventures emboldened by Facebook's world-changing success have sought to translate the behavioral tricks that psychologist B.F. Skinner applied to the gambling kiosk to every mobile app under the sun. "When a gambler feels favored by luck, dopamine is released," Natasha Schüll, author of Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, told the Guardian in March. All Facebook managed to do was find a way to miniaturize the captivating logic of the slot machine—with no cost to the user but their time and attention.

While the human brain is tremendously plastic, that doesn't mean Facebook is savagely rewiring the human brain. Indeed, the Facebook users in the Cal State–Fullerton study "showed greater activation of their amygdala and striatum, brain regions that are involved in impulsive behavior," as Live Science's Tia Ghose reported at the time. Ghose continued: "But unlike in the brains of cocaine addicts, for instance, the Facebook users showed no quieting of the brain systems responsible for inhibition in the prefrontal cortex." Facebook isn't fundamentally rewiring the structure of the human brain, but its ubiquity has the same relative effect by kicking our rewards centers into overdrive.

“Emotionally and cognitively and executively the brain has established a lot of pathways,” says Dr. Sanam Hafeez, a licensed clinical psychologist and neuropsychologist. “The more you do something the more ingrained it becomes in neural pathways, much like how a computer that stores the sites you visit — when you log onto your browser, they will pop up because you use them a lot. Change is an upheaval of many things and the brain has to work to fit it into an existing framework.”

“You absolutely can and should teach your brain to change,” says Hafeez, noting that keeping the brain agile has been shown to help delay aging. “I've done quite a bit of work on the aging process and slowing that down. It starts with changing the aversion to change.”

“Let’s say you’re a financial planer who takes up knitting,” says Hafeez. “That is doing something very different, where the brain truly has to adapt new neural pathways. Learning a new skill like this have been shown to ward off dementia, aging and cognitive decline because it regenerates cellular activity. Learn a new language in middle age. You tax your brain by shaking things up and it’s effective for your body in the way HIIT is for your body.”

These clusters of living brain cells are popularly known as minibrains, though scientists prefer to call them cerebral organoids. At the moment, they remain extremely rudimentary versions of an actual human brain and are used primarily to study brain development and disorders like autism.

But minibrain research is progressing so quickly that scientists need to start thinking about the potential implications now, says Nita Farahany, a professor of law and philosophy at Duke University and the director of Duke Science and Society.

"If you're talking about something like schizophrenia or autism, if you want to model those things, it is difficult to do so with animal models and it is ethically impossible in many instances to do so with living humans," She says. But it is possible to grow a minibrain from cells with genetic mutations associated with like autism and watch how it develops.

The technology is in widespread use around the world but China has applied it on an unprecedented scale in factories, public transport, state-owned companies and the military to increase the competitiveness of its manufacturing industry and to maintain social stability.

Jin said that at present China’s brain-reading technology was on a par with that in the West but China was the only country where there had been reports of massive use of the technology in the workplace.

With improved speed and sensitivity, the device could even become a “mental keyboard” allowing the user to control a computer or mobile phone with their mind.

But new research finds one factor that influences the rate at which our brains age is largely outside our control: our socioeconomic status.

"Engaging and resourceful environments associated with higher socioeconomic status may provide a buffer or delay against aging," the researchers write. "Inadequate health conditions associated with lower socioeconomic status environments (such as exposure to toxins and poorer nutrition), together with continual stress, may accelerate the aging process."

Using neuroimaging, the researchers evaluated participants' brains in two ways, measuring "functional network organization and cortical gray matter thickness." They found both measures demonstrated greater aging in people of lower socioeconomic status, even after accounting for demographic differences and personal health.